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Topic Review (Newest First)

10-12-2012 02:23 PM

hellosailor

Re: Sat-nav devices face big errors as solar activity rises

"And the powers of the administration have shut down Loran in order to save a few pennies. "
Well, no, actually, LORAN-C is no answer to the problem. I've had LORAN-C tell me the next mark was a thousand miles away located somewhere in Kansas, while racing in LI Sound (NY). LORAN-C suffered from a host of inherent problems and distortions and while it is a good idea to have some second source to poll against any one position, LORAN-C wasn't perfect.

BBC has also written that they expect the distortion from solar flares to cause a GPS inaccuracy of tens of meters, so we're looking at perhaps a 20-50 meter degradation during heavy flares, and if you are using WAAS or another correction system, that should be resolving the error from the flares as well.

If you aren't picking your head up and confirming your position well before you get within fifty meters of anything hard, sharp, or solid? SALVAGE!

When those alledge Major Solar Flares erupt.
For now we will just have to wait and see what happens...
There is no way that I know of to protect all of those satellites up in orbit.

i only watch the Science and ecucational channels.. a recent NASA documentary.
NASA is well aware of the solar flare energy problem.. most satelittes are shielded. NASA has sent Satlites out towards the Sun to warn of Solar eruptions or flares.. Astronauts will hear an alarm and get behind the shield, some satelittes can turn thier back.. Some of earth`s satellittes have survived 30- 40 years orbiting the earth. i wonder if Sputnick or Telstar are still alive.?/

And the powers of the administration have shut down Loran in order to save a few pennies. Their illogical wisedom of landlubbers hard at work again and screwing it up again...
GESH!!

GPS serves far more users than the Loran system ever did. Aviation industry, military, cars, trains, trucks, hikers, tracks stolen cars. I think elimination of the Loran system makes sense. Limited to use by a small group, duplicating what is available on another more widely available system. The Loran system cost more than pennies and I'm OK with saving a few.

Newswise — Brady O'Hanlon is a Cornell University doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering. He conducts research on GPS software receivers and the study of space weather.

O’Hanlon comments on the increase in solar flare activity over the last two days, which may affect GPS and other electronics on Earth and in space.

He says:

“The average person need not yet resort to compass and map.

“Civilian GPS receivers – like the one in your phone or car – will likely not see any notable effects from this particular event, but applications requiring high precision like aircraft may have reduced availability. These effects depend largely on the structure of the solar wind when it reaches Earth, and we only have about an hour of warning if severe space weather is on the way.

“These recent solar events are notable because they herald the increased activity we can expect over the next several years as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year activity cycle. GPS usage has become ubiquitous over the past several years, a period which happened to coincide with extremely low solar activity. Expect to see periodic disruptions in GPS service over the next several years.”

02-17-2011 01:55 PM

Boasun

When those alledge Major Solar Flares erupt, It isn't just Satellite Navigation but also Sat Communications and Sat Television/Radio, could be affected. For now we will just have to wait and see what happens... There is no way that I know of to protect all of those satellites up in orbit.

02-17-2011 10:57 AM

Boasun

And the powers of the administration have shut down Loran in order to save a few pennies. Their illogical wisedom of landlubbers hard at work again and screwing it up again...
GESH!!

02-17-2011 05:27 AM

Flybyknight

Sat-nav devices face big errors as solar activity rises

This supports my thesis on not relying on electronics alone to get from point A to B

GPS to suffer from awakening sun
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News Researchers say the Sun is awakening after a period of low activity, which does not bode well for a world ever more dependent on satellite navigation.
The Sun's irregular activity can wreak havoc with the weak sat-nav signals we use.
The last time the Sun reached a peak in activity, satellite navigation was barely a consumer product.
But the Sun is on its way to another solar maximum, which could generate large and unpredictable sat-nav errors.
It is not just car sat-nav devices that make use of the satellite signals; accurate and dependable sat-nav signals have, since the last solar maximum, quietly become a necessity for modern infrastructure.
Military operations worldwide depend on them, although they use far more sophisticated equipment.
Sat-nav devices now form a key part of emergency vehicles' arsenals. They are used for high-precision surveying, docking ships and they may soon be used to automatically land commercial aircraft.
Closer to home, more and more trains depend on a firm location fix before their doors will open. Simple geometry
The satellite navigation concept is embodied currently by the US GPS system and Russia's Glonass network, with contenders to come in the form of Europe's Galileo constellation and China's Compass system.
It depends on what is - at its root - a simple triangulation calculation.
A fleet of satellites circling the Earth are constantly beaming a radio signal with two bits of exceptionally precise information: where exactly they are, and at exactly what time.
A sat-nav receiver on Earth - or on a ship or plane - collects the time and position signals from the satellites that happen to be in its line of sight.
It then works out, based on how long it took those signals to arrive, how far it is from each of those satellites. Some simple geometry yields its position.

1. Satellites advertise their exact position, and the precise time at which they are sending it

2. The signal travels through the outer atmosphere, the ionosphere; its speed depends on how much the Sun's radiation and particle winds are affecting the ionosphere's composition

3. A receiver on Earth determines how long the signals took to arrive from a number of satellites, calculating the position from the time differences

But those signals are incredibly weak and, as researchers have only recently begun to learn, sensitive to the activity on the Sun.
Solar flares - vast exhalations of magnetic energy from the Sun's surface - spray out radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves through to high-energy gamma-rays, along with bursts of high-energy particles toward the Earth.
The radiation or waves that come from the Sun can make sat-nav receivers unable to pick out the weak signal from satellites from the solar flare's aftermath.
There is little that current technology can do to mitigate this problem, with the exception of complex directional antennas used in military applications.
Sat-nav receivers will be blinded for tens of minutes, probably a few times a year at the solar maximum. Charged up
A further complication comes from the nature of the outermost layer of the Earth's atmosphere, the ionosphere.
That is composed in part of particles that have ionised, or been ripped apart by radiation from the Sun, with the composition dependent on how much radiation is coming from the Sun at a given time.
The problem comes about because sat-nav technology assumes that signals pass through at a constant speed - which in the ionosphere isn't necessarily the case.
"The key point is how fast the signals actually travelled," said Cathryn Mitchell of the University of Bath.
"When they come through the ionosphere, they slow down by an amount that is actually quite variable, and that adds an error into the system when you do the calculations for your position," Professor Mitchell told BBC News.
The amount of solar activity runs on many cycles; the ionisation will be different on the sun-lit side of the Earth from the night side, and different between summer and winter; each of these cycles imparts a small error to a sat-nav's position.

But the disruption caused by solar flares is significantly higher.
The increased radiation will ionise more molecules, and the bursts of particles can become trapped in the ionosphere as the Earth's magnetic field drags them in.
The effects that sat-nav users will face, however, are difficult to predict.
"We can look at the measurements from the last solar maximum," Professor Mitchell said.
"If we project those forward, it varies quite a lot across the Earth; looking at the UK it will be about 10-metre errors in the positioning."
The errors would be much more long-lasting than the "blindness" problem, lasting hours or even days.
"Ten metres out is probably going to be OK for a sat-nav system in a car, but if you're using the system for something safety-critical like ships coming into harbour for navigation or possibly in the future landing aircraft, you're looking for much greater accuracy and more importantly, much greater reliability."
Bob Cockshott, a director of the government-funded Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network, said that for most consumer applications such as sat-nav for cars, the problem will be more troublesome than dangerous.
"You might find for a number of hours or even a day or two you couldn't go out surveying or be able to dock your oil tanker at the deep-ocean oil well," he told BBC News.
"It's more at the annoyance level than something that's going to bankrupt your business."
A number of schemes have been proposed to do real-time corrections to the signals as the atmosphere changes, allowing for local adjustments that are broadcast to receivers by other means such as the mobile phone network.
However, Mr Cockshott said that it remains unclear whether such a correction makes sense economically for manufacturers of sat-nav-enabled technology.
So as the Sun builds up to its peak in a few years' time, be aware that your sat-nav may for a time give some strange results - or for a short while none at all.